With just over three weeks until Google officially puts its RSS service Google Reader out to pasture, the Mountain View company has decided to offer the widely respected product a few commemorative last words as it rests on its death bed.

“As a culture we have moved into a realm where the consumption of news is a near-constant process,” says Richard Gringras, Senior Director, News & Social Products at Google. “Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites throughout the course of the day — replacing the old standard behaviors of news consumption over breakfast along with a leisurely read at the end of the day.”

No matter the reason for Google Reader’s demise, alternatives have made a timely bubble up to the surface leading up to Google’s July 1 deadline. Apps like Reeder that relied on Google Reader for backend syncing have since opened up support for alternatives like Feedly and Feed Wrangler (which we reviewed at launch).

Meanwhile, Google would prefer that you direct your attention to Google+ fornewsconsumption, where we certainly have a presence, but Twitter, Facebook, and even old fashioned RSS still play a vital role in many of our lives. Google simply decided it wanted its role to reflect the modern approach to news consumption, which probably does have a wider reach albeit a different audience.

But enough alternatives have already began to compete for out attention which reassures me that we’ll all get what we want in the end. We panicked at the abrupt announcement of Google Reader sunsetting, but it turns out the road on which we travel was just changing a bit while the destination remains unchanged.